The Open Source Zone

This books is just no longer relevant. Even when it was relevant (back in 2004), it was not a good way to start learning Tapestry. I would have preferred more barebones examples, rather than jumbling a bunch of stuff into a kitchen-sink "workbench".

There is no Manning book for Tapestry 4.x, which for a long while was the way to go. "Enjoying Web Development with Tapestry" is a good book, which is like set of heavy duty tutorials with mini-evolutions of the project during the chapter. It happens to mimic the way I learn things.

Now, Tapestry 5 is on the horizon, and it looks really good so far. Hopefully someone will release a book for entry-level Tapestry adopters, especially since Tapestry 5 is radically different than/incompatible with version 3 or 4.

The Tapestry mailing list is the best replacement for this book. You may also want to search the net for a free book on Apache Maven, which is the preferred method of building applications that use developmental versions of Tapestry 5.

The book seems to be well written and very fine IF AND ONLY IF you are using version 3 and have no plans to upgrade any time soon. If you are using version 4 or plan to any time soon, trying to follow along with this book will send you on a series of wild-goose chases trying to figure out why none of the examples work. Instead I recommend Kent Tong's book, which has been revised to reflect Tapestry 4.

All of the sample code and concepts are based on version 3, and I could not get a single example to work (e.g., the Authentication example relies on the Visit class, which is deprecated. The banner ad example relies on the AbstractService class, which is gone in version 4 - the upgrade guide says simply "that class has been removed so you will have significant rewrites." Not exactly helpful in the "how to" department.)

I am learning Tapestry to use it in a project. True the learning curve is high, but with this book you not only learned how to use Tapestry but also the why's and how's behind its design. Chapter 7 (under the hood) and 10 (Implementing a sample application) are particularly good. In all a very dense and clear book suitable for intermediate to advanced readers.

this book is not well written. Tapestry is a new way of developing web applications and the author glance through way too many concepts that are essential to understand tapestry web development. For instance, OGNL is havily used by tapestry, but the author does not even bother to spend a little time explaining how it's been used by tapestry. I was left with a lot more questions on tapestry after reading this book. This book only serves as an introduction to tapestry and lacks full coverage. If you buy this book, you will have to spend a lot of time researching the net to find answers to basic question that (I think) should have been addressed by the book. Especially since the author is also the lead developer of Tapestry.

Also be aware that this book only covers Tapestry 3.0 and not 4.0

This book describes Tapestry 3, while Tapestry 4 will be hopefully released soon, in some aspects quite different from it's predecessor. But still, I would recommend this book to everyone who is going to use Tapestry and who wants to understand the framework. Because Howard, being the creator of Tapestry, shows the main ideas and principles around which the framework was built, and the most important of them do not change with a next release. They only become more efficiently expressed.

Having said that, I should warn that this isn't the best book for the complete Tapestry beginners. In a number of cases the author tries to speak at a beginner's level, but he obviously knows too much :) and cares too much for this.

However, there is a number of Tapestry tutorials available in the Web, and having started with them, you will definitely want to read this book.